The present invention relates to a copier, facsimile apparatus or similar image forming apparatus having a translation capability and, more particularly, to an image forming apparatus capable of optically reading a document (or receiving image data over a communication channel), recognizing words included in the image data read or received, and outputting equivalents for the words to thereby generate a word list.
Even a person having a good knowledge of certain foreign language is often prevented from reading the whole writing written in that language due to only some words belonging to a particular or special field and whose equivalents are not known. Then, the person has to look up a dictionary to see the meanings of the unknown words.
In light of the above, a copier capable of translating a writing written in a foreign language and outputting the translation thereof automatically has been proposed, as taught in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 62-154845 by way of example. This kind of copier has image reading means for reading a document image, discriminating means for discriminating graphic data and text data included in the image read, translating means for recognizing the text data character by character and translating the contents into the mother tongue. The resulting translation image is output together with the original image. The translation image associated with the text data makes it needless for a person to look up a dictionary.
However, the conventional copier with a translation capability is redundant and not always functional for persons having a certain knowledge of a foreign language, considering the state-of-the-art translation technologies, which are not entirely free from errors, and costs for implementing such a copier. To eliminate this problem, it has been customary to add equivalents to words present in an original image or to collect the words and their equivalents in a word list. With any one of these improved schemes, persons with some reading knowledge of a foreign language are provided with sufficient information and can read writings written in the foreign language efficiently and rapidly.
Although the improved schemes stated above may be desirable for ordinary documents written in a foreign language, they have some issues yet to be solved when it comes to writings belonging to a particular or special field. It is a common practice with a dictionary containing equivalents for words of foreign language to arrange equivalents of frequent use first; equivalents belonging to particular or special fields appear after the equivalents of frequent use. A word list having equivalents arranged in such an order makes it awkward to read a writing belonging to a particular or special field. Particularly, for a person having a good knowledge of a foreign language and familiar with the ordinary meanings and equivalents of words, but knowing little of words belonging to particular arts, the conventional schemes are undesirable from the efficiency standpoint.